Our landlord hired Southern Plumbing to replace the water cylinder in our flat. As my partner has…read morealready stated in his review, it was a horrible experience. I'm not sure who their normal clientele is, but for some reason they expected us to be home during the week and available at their beck and call. Like many in Wellington, we both work for the government and have normal 9 to 5 jobs. Taking unplanned time away from work isn't easy when people are relying on you to be in the office and present for meetings. We aren't angry at the world, just at Southern Plumbing!
As our landlord lives in Christchurch, he leaves it to us to coordinate directly with tradies, valuers, etc., and this situation was no different. Until recently we owned property overseas, so we understand how difficult repairs can be when you're an absentee landlord. We go out of our way to accommodate anyone that needs access to the flat and do our best to oversee any work, ensure it's done in a timely fashion, and to a high-standard. Unfortunately, since we weren't the one's paying the invoice, Southern Plumbing didn't feel the need to show us any respect or courtesy. They wasted our valuable time and treated us like second rate human beings (further demonstrated by their reply to my partner's review).
In total, Southern Plumbing was at our flat three times. The work was completed during the first visit (or so we thought), which began at 10:00am and ended at 6:00pm. We had working hot water by the end of the day and considered the job done. However, a supervisor stopped by the next day to "check" the work, resulting in a third visit to fix work that wasn't done correctly the first time. When contacted by Andrea in the office to schedule the third visit, we were told they would be there the next day between 8:00am and 8:30am and the work would take four hours. Andrea was unable to tell us why it was going to take 4 hours and seemed to have little interest in finding out for us. Begrudgingly, she made a call to someone and called back only to say that they need to cover a hole, do some tidying up, and would explain more when they arrive between 8:00am and 8:30 am. At this point I made it clear that unless they could tell me exactly what needed to be done, one hour is more than sufficient to "cover a hole" with a piece of plywood. I also made it clear that they do not dictate our availability and they will come at a time that's convenient for us, as this was now the third visit. My partner made arrangements to stay home from work yet again, and Southern Plumbing was to come two days later no earlier than 9:00am - instead they showed up at 8:25am while I was getting ready to go to work.
G12/AS1 clause 5.2.3 of the New Zealand Build Code states that safe trays are required with the installation of all new water cylinders. While Southern Plumbing installed our water cylinder with a safe tray, they didn't install it in a way that is sufficiently drained - this was the real reason for the third visit. If it weren't for the apprentice, we never would have known what the actual issue was. Southern Plumbing wasted four hours of our time by not installing the water cylinder and safe tray correctly on the first visit, and they couldn't even be bothered to explain why we had to take time out of our day for the visit because they, "only communicate with tenants regarding access and letting tenants know when we will be back to finish." Newsflash, tenants are people too!
They claim to have completed over 65,000 jobs, but how many of those were actually done correctly (not ours the first time!)? They have "26,000 customers", but only 46 Google reviews - I think that speaks volumes about the quality of their work and level of customer satisfaction. When our new house is finished being built next year, we definitely won't be using Southern Plumbing personally, and I recommend you don't either. I hear Grant Plumbing does excellent work, at least that's what my work mate said when I was sharing our horrible experience with my colleagues.
